Intel Mac comes very poor second to PPC

[Hyperspeed]

I'm sorry, I was merely attempting to sabotage the thread.

Forgive me.

:-D

[Tomas]

I'd pesonally prefer an nForce4 chipset

I just got myself a brand new amd64 and mobo using the nforce4 chipset and i must say i am dissapointed in it. The main problem with the nforce4, is that the PCI perfomance of it sucks. It was for example impossible to get my hardware mpeg2 dvb-s "nexus-s" card to work because of these issues. Whenever there is slight movement, the picture gets completly corrupted unless you resize the picture to a tiny window. I first thought it was my particular mobo "gigabyte" that was the problem, but it happens to be that any mobo using the nforce4 chipset has this issue. :-( Adjusting the pci latency wont solve this issue either and the corruption is worse than i experienced on my old k6-2 with a {bleep}ty via chipset.

The same board worked just fine on my old via kt133a and the kt333 and even my really old compaq pentium 3.

I can use the card somewhat when using software decoding instead of the built in hardware decoder of the card.
I think this will affect any similar cards like tvtuners and other dvb cards as well.

[minator]

I've already earmarked funds for a MacBook and Logic 7.2!

I'd wait until later in the year, looks like Intel's next gen are going to give AMD something of a problem...
Also looks like they should do fairly well on vectorised stuff (e.g. audio), the current gen isn't, if you look at the vector benchmarks it's the single area the G4 is ahead of the Core duo.

My GF isn't happy, for some reason she wants to waste my money on a house

In London?  -shudder-

[Hyperspeed]

by Hyperspeed:
We have to double our CPU power every 18 months! So what if we wanted to triple it... would Intel break their own Daddy's "Law"?

by bloodline:
It's not a law it was an observation of the semiconductor industry in the 70's which has held true as a general trend ever since (but it's basicly slowing).

http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/mooreslaw/

Here's another interesting URL:
http://www.fatfree.com/recipes/salads/coleslaw

Arse Technica is pretty interesting but a little shambolic. It mixes science, videogames and tech info onto pages designed by Mr.Boring, Greysville.

One of the articles was interesting about China using secret chips to control information in public PCs (and noone knew exactly what they did).

I then accidentally stumbled across this URL:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_1950.html

... it made me think about the Pentium 3's serial registration... and the Centrino.

!

[billt]

The first Intel Macs aren't as fast as the last PowerPC macs. Didn't people complain about the same thing back during the 68K->PPC switch? Did they fall apart because of transistion the first time?

I think they'll survive and things will improve. When they do and prices come down, I'd love a Mac laptop, especially if it can run all my OSes, Windows, Linux, and even Amihon? Still haven't got that last one running on my AMD64 laptop though so the fancy new stuff might prevent it. :/ I'd have loved an iBook G4 for OS4, but alas it isn't meant to be and I'm left pondering other platforms for convenient portability.

[blakespot]

billt wrote:
The first Intel Macs aren't as fast as the last PowerPC macs. Didn't people complain about the same thing back during the 68K->PPC switch? Did they fall apart because of transistion the first time?

The Intel Mac are rather fast actually.  G4 apps running under Rosetta on the new iMac Core Duos are generally FASTER than running native on G4 Macs.  (Complex 3D games a notable exception.)

http://www.maconintel.com/news.php?article=112

My 2.0GHz MacBook Pro (Core Duo) feels almost as fast as my dual G5 2.5 Power Mac.  Good stuff.




bp

[Hyperspeed]

Joke:

What's the difference between an Apple laptop and a PC laptop...

[bloodline]

Hyperspeed wrote:
Joke:

What's the difference between an Apple laptop and a PC laptop...

I don't get it?

What's the difference between an iMac G3 and an AmigaOne?

[adz]

Hyperspeed wrote:
Joke:

What's the difference between an Apple laptop and a PC laptop...

That makes about as much sense and jamming my testicles into a blender :roll:

[Karlos]

adz wrote:

Hyperspeed wrote:
Joke:

What's the difference between an Apple laptop and a PC laptop...

That makes about as much sense and jamming my testicles into a blender :roll:

> ouch! <

[hppacito]

On topic:

From the reviews, is clear that they are faster. 4 times... not in everything, but multithreaded applications get really bumped.

Sadly they raised the price for the minis... 649 Euro is a bit too much, and 84 Euro for a keyboard and a mouse is just plain absurd (there is no insert key !, how I'm supposed to use mc ?!?.

Off topic:

Someone mentioned the development of mmx from intel. I heard almost 10 years ago, that Intel came up with some software-multimedia package/routines and moco$oft told them, that with that software there was no need for win95 (there was no need, I used OS/2 at the time) and they will not sell it, so they would not allow that software to happen, so the Intel people came up with this "mm-software" inside the processor.

Anybody know how all that was ?

(I heard it one Intel conference for new resellers for their new Intel processors integrator programme).

[bloodline]

hppacito wrote:
On topic:

From the reviews, is clear that they are faster. 4 times... not in everything, but multithreaded applications get really bumped.

My tests have shown a massive speed increase over the G4... no surprise there, but the fact that the Core Duo is also able to edge out the single core 970, and use much less power is a really nice feature... :-)

Sadly they raised the price for the minis... 649 Euro is a bit too much, and 84 Euro for a keyboard and a mouse is just plain absurd (there is no insert key !, how I'm supposed to use mc ?!?.

The Price increase of the Mini is a bit hard to swallow... but it does have a better feature set than the G4 machine it replaces (more RAM, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Digital Audio, more USB...). for it to be really attractive to me, It would have to be under the £300 mark... then I'd be a Mac Mini owner :-)

Off topic:

Someone mentioned the development of mmx from intel. I heard almost 10 years ago, that Intel came up with some software-multimedia package/routines and moco$oft told them, that with that software there was no need for win95 (there was no need, I used OS/2 at the time) and they will not sell it, so they would not allow that software to happen, so the Intel people came up with this "mm-software" inside the processor.

Anybody know how all that was ?

(I heard it one Intel conference for new resellers for their new Intel processors integrator programme).

I have no idea what you are talking about, but when MMX was introduced 3D games were becoming common, and GFX cards were little better than the Amiga Chipset. There was a need for vector processing, and most high end workstations were being given Vector units... I think it was logical for intel try and get in on the act... They didn't really implement it very well (they did a better job with SSE +), and GFX cards started to grow vector units, and have become the powerhouses we now take for granted.

[Agafaster]

From the reviews, is clear that they are faster. 4 times... not in everything, but multithreaded applications get really bumped.

funny that ! hmm - lets take a ganders at the raw hardware spec for a moment, particular note paid to the speed of the CPU's interface to things like RAM...

Mac Mini G4 (1.67GHz CPU) 167MHz FSB.
Mac Mini Intel (1.50GHz CPU) 667 MHz FSB.

667/167 is 4 - the intel can talk to RAM 4 times more frequently than the G4.

I know its utterly pointless, but I wonder how things would look if the intel was handicapped to a 167MHz FSB ?

we could really do with a more modern FSB on our PPCs !

[uncharted]

billt wrote:
The first Intel Macs aren't as fast as the last PowerPC macs. Didn't people complain about the same thing back during the 68K->PPC switch? Did they fall apart because of transistion the first time?

This transition is nothing like the previous one.  OS X has been running on x86 before it was even called OS X. Already a number of applications I use are Universal (I'm still running on PPC BTW).  I did a comparison of the Core Du and G5 iMacs at an Apple store, and the intel one was noticably faster in general use.

I think they'll survive and things will improve. When they do and prices come down, I'd love a Mac laptop, especially if it can run all my OSes, Windows, Linux, and even Amihon? Still haven't got that last one running on my AMD64 laptop though so the fancy new stuff might prevent it. :/ I'd have loved an iBook G4 for OS4, but alas it isn't meant to be and I'm left pondering other platforms for convenient portability.

The iBook is indeed a nice laptop, best I've ever owned.  IMHO running OS4 on it would be a waste.

[uncharted]

bloodline wrote:

I have no idea what you are talking about, but when MMX was introduced 3D games were becoming common, and GFX cards were little better than the Amiga Chipset.

I distinctly remember going into HMV and seeing that game that was the first to take advantage of MMX, that really crap racing game, can't remember it's name though.  That must of been nearly 9 years ago. Man, i'm getting old :-(

[minator]

Someone mentioned the development of mmx from intel. I heard almost 10 years ago, that Intel came up with some software-multimedia package/routines and moco$oft told them, that with that software there was no need for win95 (there was no need, I used OS/2 at the time) and they will not sell it, so they would not allow that software to happen, so the Intel people came up with this "mm-software" inside the processor.

Intel put a lot of effort into producing a DSP library, Microsoft managed to talk Intel into killing it.